There is much talk at the moment about the importance of measurement, including a reference to it in many of the speeches I listened to during the TUC march through London against public spending cuts on Saturday (itself a very uplifting and peaceful process which took me back to the marches of the 80s).  The fact is there has always been talk of how we measure the difference we can make, only over the years it was sunk in a pond full of targets.

So, I am pleased to now hear ‘why we need to know if we make a difference’; the only trouble this time around is that much of what is being said is poppycock, and expressed by people who have been on a course – or worse still, now think they are the experts!  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially since in the wrong hands measurement will be misused and become either a financial measurement of success or a target in a commission. In fact measurement used wisely is neither of those things.

We have already seen how confusion over the concept of measuring impact has led many children centres to collect data that has often been neither appropriate, relevant nor actually helped tell the story of the real difference their centre was genuinely making.  In such cases, those concerned simply failed to understand the distinction between input, outputs, outcomes and impact.

Nowadays, we also hear a lot about payment by results which essentially means that a proportion of the payment, from central or local government to providers, is dependent on achieving specified results – for example, a reduction in reconvictions among young offenders.  Elsewhere, Graham Allen and his team have introduced us to the concept of creating funds to develop services using Social Impact Bonds (SIB).  SIBs are designed to secure upfront investment from non-government sources, such as charitable foundations and private individuals, and could offer a real chance to invest in early intervention services.  Investors will then receive their returns from the government once the specified, measured outcomes have been achieved; what’s more, such defined improvements to the service ultimately lead to savings from the public purse.

At LEYF we have spent the last year finding a way of measuring our social return on investment. Social return on investment (SROI) is an approach that aims to capture the social and environmental benefits of a service. The process involves talking with stakeholders to identify what social value means to them; finding appropriate indicators of change taking place and comparing the financial value of the social change created to the financial cost of producing these changes. An SROI ratio is a comparison between the value being generated by the impact of an intervention, and the investment required to achieve that impact.

In our case, we essentially wanted to know what everyone was getting from choosing to use, work or train in a LEYF nursery; it was a laborious but interesting process. The data gathered was used to track the progress of the children, staff members and our apprentices, measuring the outcomes, whether we made a difference and by what amount, before finally benchmarking this against meaningful proxies such as a national average for similar services.  It has involved talking to many, many people – including seeking their opinion on the very measures to adopt.  What we learned from this was that achieving meaningful measurement is far from simple if you want to produce helpful and relevant results.

Over the past few months, I have been talking with and presenting to local authority commissioners about how they might most effectively invest their limited funds in supporting childcare. They struck me as people who genuinely want to get a good service for their clients but are stymied by lack of funds, European rules, lack of direction from their ‘betters’ and uncertainties as to which service will provide the best option. Measurement seems to be the final straw for them, as they try and find solutions to many of the most intractable social ills.

However, there is a wealth of information available and lots of ideas of different ways to commission for better outcomes. We know about the best length of a contract (minimum 5 years), the importance of forming relationships with commissioners, keeping monitoring sharp, focused and helpful, sorting TUPE, dealing with the legal team and the many other issues commissioners and providers have to iron out.  Surely then, this must be the perfect time to pull all these ideas into a coherent whole and move forward?

What’s needed now is a consortia or network based on the principle of Early Intervention; it would bring together providers, commissioners and investors to explore how we might firstly devise a financial vehicle to invest and fund new initiatives and secondly develop a set of plans, ideas and tools to help us measure the results.  Without such a three-way conversation, such a co-ordinated and collaborative approach, we will continue to talk about this complicated, abstract concept in our own little silos with little progress, much confusion and some awful policy decisions the only outcomes.  In the meantime, we will be inundated with toolkits, which will be neatly placed on a shelf and forgotten about.

Right now, what we really need is to be as connected to others as possible.  If nothing else, for starters this would bring the conversation about measurement, outcomes, social investment, payment by results and social return out of the darkness and into the light. Perhaps it is something our new strategic partners at the DfE can develop?

As always, please send me your comments below and continue this conversation with friends and colleagues via email and your favourite social networks.  Where the future of this debate is concerned, I look forward to your personal inputs..!

Related articles

• “Success Bonds” touted as Obama bright idea (nowpublic.com)
• Making the case for early intervention (guardian.co.uk)

I have learned that if I am to truly avoid all contact with the world of work, then I need to go abroad without a phone or internet access.  To this end, I recently spent a lovely few days immersed in the renaissance art of Florence.

On my return came the announcement that the Department of Education had allocated £60m of hard earned tax payers’ money to over 100 so-called voluntary and community organisations. The serenity of the Botticellis soon evaporated into a sort of Sir Henry Taylor level of gall and indignation – as his saying ‘where there are large powers with little ambition, nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes’ came rapidly to mind.

Why was I feeling so cross? Principally because the purpose of the grants was to enable organisations to play a more significant role in reforming and delivering services for children, young people, parents and families – and with a particular emphasis on early intervention and tackling the needs of the most disadvantaged groups. What weasel words.  Is this not another way of wasting our time and effort, whilst looking at ways of cutting funds for children services.  Funding the usual suspects is hardly an innovative way forward.

Maybe I am being unfair, but in these difficult times – where organisations like mine are losing significant contracts to provide for children in need and run children centre services – it’s hard to stomach sums of over £100k plus being allocated to endless support organisations, many of which should be partnered up and formed into single entities.  According to the department, the aim of these grants is to free organisations up from dependency on grants… well there is little need to become sustainable if all the central costs are funded by tax payers.  What is the point of the Transition Funds? Was this not designed to support such organisations become sustainable? In my book, that’s £160m of money that could be better spent providing real services to children and their families.

I was also baffled and bemused by the other big decision (worth £1m over two years), which saw the strategic lead partnership for the early years and childcare sector allocated to a group of organisations, none of which are either specifically early years or childcare. I suppose what galled me more was how this would pay for at least 65 full daycare places with family support in my organisation for vulnerable children in high need. Instead, this is something we currently have to raise our own funds for, since such children not yet on the Child Protection list no longer constitute high priority. So much for applying the principles of early intervention…

The allocation of all this money is supposed to develop a vigorous and responsive sector, freed up from the dependency on grants and better equipped to operate within a payment by results environment; it is meant to make such organisations commissioning ready and look at innovative approaches to lever private investment. What strikes me is there is quite a tension and I will be intrigued to understand how organisations funded by the department can offer independence, challenge and innovation. Let’s only hope Jonathan Swift’s comment that ‘power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent’ remains high in all our minds.